Mariadb installation woes

[CougTek]

I followed this guide to install Mariadb 5.5 alongside MySQL 5.5.31. It went smoothly up to the point where I'm supposed to copy and edit my-medium.cnf. It's because, the file isn't there. There's a my-medium.cnf.sh in /opt/mariadb/support-files, but no my-medium.cnf. Same goes for my-small.cnf and my-large.cnf.

In details, this is what I did so far, as a root :

#> cp mariadb-5.5.31.tar.gz /opt
#> cd /opt
#opt> tar -zxvf mariadb-5.5.31.tar.gz
#opt> mkdir mariadb-data
#opt> ln -s mariadb-5.5.31 mariadb
#opt> groupadd --system mariadb
#opt> useradd -c "MariaDB Server" -d /opt/mariadb -g mariadb --system mariadb
#opt> chown -R mariadb:mariadb mariadb-5.5.31/
#opt> chown -R mariadb:mariadb mariadb-data/

Then I'm supposed to :
#opt> cp mariadb/support-files/my-medium.cnf mariadb-data/my.cnf

But the file isn't there. Why the how-to guides in Linux NEVER correspond to what we see on the screen when we try to actually do what they lead you to do?

OS is Debian 7.0, with an updated kernel (3.8.2). MySQL-server 5.5.31 is installed and running on port 3306. I'm not familiar with the installation of databases on Linux (or elsewhere, for that matter). Anyone has an idea what to do to complete the installation of MariaDB?

 

[Mercutio]

Why the how-to guides in Linux NEVER correspond to what we see on the screen when we try to actually do what they lead you to do?

Short answer: Because the software gets updated a lot more often than the documentation. Truth is, most of the folks who work on this stuff know enough about conventions that if they're even sort-of in the right general area they can work out what needs to be done and the documentation just becomes a set of hints for what needs to be accomplished. I'm not familiar with mariadb but why aren't you installing from apt?

 

[timwhit]

Just use MySQL if it's available in your repo. I would wait to install MariaDB until the distro maintainer replaces MySQL with it.

 

[CougTek]

I'm not familiar with mariadb but why aren't you installing from apt?

I tried, but it fails. Don't remember the dependancy error and at this point, I don't really care either. Anyway, I want to install it on a second hard drive (an SSD to be precise) and I don't think apt-get would let me do that. It would put it in the default directory, which isn't what I want.

The goal is to have both MySQL and MariaDB and to test their performance for our database usage pattern on both a mecanical drive array and an SSD. MySQL is already installed.

 

[CougTek]

Just use MySQL if it's available in your repo. I would wait to install MariaDB until the distro maintainer replaces MySQL with it.

The company's lead programmer is more eager than you are. He's also my boss. I have to make this work.

 

[timwhit]

It should not matter where you install the software, just where it stores it's data files. If you actually get it to install, you should be able to configure the place it stores the files.

 

[Chewy509]

AFAIK, MariaDB and MySQL use the same configuration file format, so just copy the my.cnf from the MySQL setup for MariaDB, and then update the various configuration items namely datastore location and LAN setup (eg IP address, port numbers, etc). (Those details should be obvious).

If you are going to do a true side-by-side comparison you'll need the configuration files as close together as possible anyway.

Also the files could be under /share/mariadb...